by Brunno Almeida Maia
Since the emergence of modernity in the 19th century, fashion has questioned its ‘contradictory essence’, i.e. what defines it, equally, as an aesthetic and cultural manifestation of society, a social organization of appearance linked to the capitalist mode of production, but also as an artistic language. In this respect, this brief essay aims, firstly, to trace the genealogy of the relationship between fashion and art as a way of understanding the origin of its ‘contradictory essence’. Secondly, it aims to raise the question: even though linked to the capitalist mode of production and consumption, “what are the conditions of possibility for considering fashion as an aesthetic and artistic language?”
In retrospect, Charles Frederick Worth, considered the ‘father’ of haute couture, introduced certain changes that would henceforth define the fate of Eurocentric fashion. If in the Ancien Régime, and even in the articles sold in the magasins de nouveauté, the notion of authority, as authorship – an author who creates based on a worldview – went unchallenged, with haute couture, a collection of forms that materialized these ideas through fabrics, colors, trims, accessories, shoes, and the specific techniques of modeling, moulage, and sewing, had placed Worth as an authority; it was he who pioneered the use of the clothing label with a signature bearing his name, in line with the Renaissance tradition of signing paintings, giving the work the grandeur of an auratic character.
As Gilles Lipovetsky notes, “the couturier’s new vocation was accompanied by an extraordinary social promotion. Under the Ancien Régime, tailors and seamstresses were anonymous characters relegated to the lower sphere of the ‘mechanical arts’; their names, in the booklets and texts that echo fashion from near or far, were hardly ever mentioned. The novelties in vogue then bore the name of the great personage, the nobleman, who had launched such and such a fashion. The change came in the 19th century, especially with Worth: from that moment on, the couturier enjoyed unprecedented prestige, was recognized as a poet, his name was celebrated in fashion magazines, and he appeared in novels with the traits of an aesthete, the undisputed arbiter of elegance.”¹
Fashion and painting
In 1950s Brazil, the philosopher Gilda de Mello e Souza was a pioneer in theorizing the “specificity of the couturier’s creative and productive process”, introducing concepts that reflect the essence of the artistic and technical language of fashion. In her doctoral thesis, Gilda brings together the creative processes of the painter, the architect, and the couturier. Like painting, fashion requires harmony between the field of vision and the education of the eye, but it is also through the sense of touch and the conquest of spatiality that it establishes itself as an artistic language; It is “through touch and apprehension” that we are able to complete the perception of appearances.²
In the couturier’s creative/productive process, painting relates to fashion “by intervening in the chromatic scheme, by providing motifs for accessories or for the printing of fabrics,”³ or, in poetic form, the chromatic scheme is capable of transforming the body-dress into a painting in motion. In the history of Eurocentric art, there are countless examples of the relationship between painting and fashion,⁴ in which clothing not only helped formal composition by creating atmosphere – as in Jan Van Eyck’s late gothic and Botticelli’s renaissance – but also allowed the painter to be contemporary with his own time, to know how to extract the truth of his work through the transient beauty of fashion.
In this respect, the impressionists not only – as is often claimed – replaced the artificial light of the studio with the natural light of the metropolitan landscape, but, attentive to the transformations in optical perception caused by photography, i.e. the darkroom’s ability to capture gesture at the moment of its making, impressionism was able to record life in the metropolis, seeking to extract the instant from gesture, the subtlety of the sliding fabric of a dress, the composition of a ‘philosophy of the instant’ through painting. Analyzing the philosophical and aesthetic significance of the impressionists and the fashion prints of Constantin Guys, Baudelaire proposed “the establishment of a rational and historical theory of beauty, as opposed to the theory of a single and absolute beauty.”⁵ For the poet, the modern work of art must be composed of the dialectic between eternal beauty – the aspiration of the modern to become classical – composed of “[…] an eternal, invariable element, the quantity of which is too difficult to determine” and transitory beauty, “a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if we wish, a succession or combination of epoch, fashion, morals, passion.”⁶
Heirs of this Baudelairean tradition, the modernists of the early 20th century proposed a blurring of the boundaries between artistic languages. As a continuation of the Arts and Crafts movement – which in the mid-19th century, in the figures of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, already advocated the union of artist and craftsman, the revaluation of artisanal work as a response to the mechanization and standardization of industrial processes – the modernists and couturiers – alongside design and architecture, carried out a radical critique of the old separation between the applied arts (the production of technique) and the fine arts (the production of the life of the spirit).
Fashion design in modernism was about restoring poetry and beauty to concrete and vital existence, challenging the separation between art and life. Through fashion, these artists sought to emphasize the body-dress as a ‘force field’ for the convergence of the other arts: Raoul Dufy’s fauvist painting studies, which became prints for the Paul Poiret maison; Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s dresses, which wove veritable textile poems; in Italian futurism, the ideas of architecture contoured the forms of garments; and in French Surrealism, the transposition of Dalí’s sculptures and paintings into dreamily displaced wearable objects on the body, as proposed by couturier Elsa Schiaparelli.
For the surrealists, ‘revolutionizing the life of the spirit’ meant expanding perception and sensory reason. According to the philosopher Walter Benjamin, an interpreter of the Surrealists, the experience of ‘profane illumination’ in the space of metropolitan life is responsible for this broadening of perception, in other words, the perception of the beauty of chance encounters through the doctrine of similarities, Baudelairean correspondances, and free associations. The subject of experience is forced to create shifts of meaning in their own perception of reality between things that exist and seem to have no relationship. This concept appears in the ‘artist’s clothes’ proposed by the surrealist couturier Elsa Schiaparelli in her partnerships with Salvador Dalí. In her aesthetic conception, the gesture is able to enter and transfigure space by cutting and trimming, dismantling and reassembling the Forms of the body-dress and the objects that make up the garment.⁷
Fashion and architecture
Like the architect, the couturier’s creative/productive process aims to solve formal problems inherent in the material, in other words, to make the transition from the abstract idea expressed in the sketch (fashion design) to the Form of the (three-dimensional) garment.⁸ Through the ‘art of space’, Gilda weaves the relationship between the creative processes of the couturier and the architect, given that both deal with the “Form that is a measure of space”,⁹ and, “independent of ephemeral life and the most immediate objects”, fashion is linked “in some way to the aesthetic currents of its time.”¹⁰ The artist/craftsman sensibility of the couturier respects the destiny of the material, its formal vocation “[…] discovering that perfect match between the color and consistency of the fabric and the general lines of the model […] tracing a coherent set of forms united by a reciprocal convenience.”¹¹ The architect also does this by solving formal problems – lines, volumes, masses, surfaces – without, however, losing sight of the aesthetic dimension.
It is in this theoretical key that relates fashion and architecture that Flávio de Carvalho’s 1951 work Experiência n. 3, o New look, can be interpreted. Heir to surrealist wanderings and Dadaist performances, Experiência n. 3, which took place in the streets of downtown São Paulo, featured the Brazilian multi-artist wearing a green pleated petticoat, a yellow nylon blouse with puffed sleeves and holes under his arms that allowed air to circulate between the body and the fabric. At the time, it was an explicit critique of the bourgeois conformism present at Christian Dior’s New Look (1947) at the Tailleur Bar, the influence of Eurocentric ways of dressing in Brazil, the typical uniform of the bourgeois man in the world of work (the suit and tie), but above all, an aesthetic-political proposition combining fashion and architecture: how is clothing a way of inhabiting the body, the skin, but also the world and the metropolis?
On the occasion of the A cidade do homem nu (2010) [The City of the Naked Man] exhibition, at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM), curator Inti Guerrero pointed out in the catalog text that Flávio de Carvalho’s New Look costume, which was designed for “[…] the climatic, economic and cultural conditions of the urban man in the tropics,” can also be thought of as an imaginative exercise in the artist’s urban proposal. In Guerrero’s own words: “Despite not being able to implement his master plan for the city of the naked man, Flávio de Carvalho, with his New Look and Experiência n. 3, perhaps succeeded in stripping the city of its present, liberating all those who followed him from their scholastic taboos, paving the way for this new naked civilization.”¹²
As such, Flávio de Carvalho realized the relationship between the Form highlighted by the body-dress that makes up the Form in space, because the dialogue between the body and the dress is the condition and possibility of perceiving the world through spatiality. In the words of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “[…] away from my body I am only a fragment of space, there would be no space for me if I had no body”, and he concludes: “The body is our general means of having a world.”¹³ Clothes are paradigms of our being, vehicles and means of expression, not just space or place.¹⁴ As Emanuele Coccia suggests in his book Sensible Life (2010), we should highlight the metaphysical relationship between the clothes and the house, since “our clothes are our first world – our oikos – and the house is nothing but an extension of the clothes.”¹⁵
In its ‘contradictory essence’, Fashion as an art proves to be close to painting and architecture. However, its Being, as an essence, is fulfilled close to the rhythmic arts, because “it is actually movement, the conquest of space, that distinguishes fashion from the other arts and makes it a specific aesthetic form.” If the painting can only be seen head-on, and the statue always offers us its still face, “fashion is the art of movement”, because it needs the body-dress, the gesture, so that the purpose of the material, the textile, fulfills its formal vocation. As an ‘art of movement’, fashion draws our Figure (Bild) in space, which manifests our inner experience, also transforming life into a work of art.¹⁷
¹ Gilles Lipovetsky. O império do efêmero – a moda e o seu destino nas sociedades modernas. Trad. Maria Lucia Machado. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2009, pp. 94-95.
² Henri Focillon. A vida das formas. Trad. Ruy Oliveira. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2001, p. 107.
³ Gilda de Mello e Souza. O espírito das roupas – a moda no século dezenove. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987, p. 37. It is important to note that the book originates from the author’s doctoral thesis, defended 37 years ago, in 1950.
⁴ Para esse assunto, cf. Cacilda Teixeira da Costa, Roupa de artista: o vestuário na obra de arte. São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, 2009.
⁵ BAUDELAIRE, Charles. Sobre a modernidade. Trad. Teixeira Coelho. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1996, pp. 10-11.
⁶ Idem.
⁷ Germano Celant. Cortar es pensar, in Jorge Lozano (org.), Moda – el poder de las apariencias. Madri: Casimiro Libros, 2015, pp. 132-133.
⁸ Gilda de Mello e Souza, 1987, pp. 26-51.
⁹ Ibid. p. 33.
¹⁰ Ibid. p. 34.
¹¹ Ibid. p. 33.
¹² Inti Guerrero, “A cidade do homem nu: de um ‘Plano diretor antropofágico’ a uma exposição” in A cidade do homem nu. São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2010, p. 16. (catálogo de exposição).
¹³ Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. Londres: Thames & Hudson, 2000, p. 265.
¹⁴ Emanuele Coccia, A vida sensível. Trad. Diego Cervelin. Florianópolis: Cultura e barbárie, 2010, p. 86.
¹⁵ Ibid. p. 87.
¹⁶ Gilda de Mello e Souza, op. cit. p. 40.
¹⁷ Nicolas Bourriaud, Formas de vida – a arte moderna e a invenção de si. Trad. Dorothée de Bruchard. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2011, pp. 11-14.
About the author
Brunno Almeida Maia is a PhD candidate in architecture and urbanism at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of the Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP), researching fashion and architecture. He holds a Master’s degree in philosophy from Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp) and was the curator and researcher of the Ema e a Moda no século XX – as roupas e a caligrafia dos gestos exhibition at the Casa Museu Ema Klabin. Author of several books, he is a guest lecturer at institutions such as USP, FAAP, Centro Universitário Belas Artes, Senac SP, Sesc SP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM São Paulo), Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS) and Fundação Stickel.